Students displaying liquor bottles turned into lamps and bottle cap collectors crafted in the shape of Minnesota can mean only one thing at St. Thomas — the annual Entrepreneurship Conference 2026.

This year’s conference took place on May 3 in the Anderson Student Center and featured business students who displayed the products they have been working on during the semester.

Sophomore Brady Evanson worked with his team on building lamps out of liquor bottles; they named their business “Bright Bottles.”

“We were connected with the Pourhouse and received a whole bunch of different kinds of bottles,” Evanson said. “From there we experimented with different drill bits and different lamp components to see what looked best with this size bottle and various sizes and shades and tried to come up with the most visually pleasing lamp possible.”

Evanson said they wanted to create a project that would appeal to the St. Thomas community.

“We wanted to do something re-purposed, since we were thinking along the lines of kind of craftwork, and we have those kinds of tools and that kind of skill set,” Evanson said. “We were… looking for something that clicked with our audience around St. Thomas … it was the crowd we understood best.”

First-year student Heather Kilber and her team wanted to make a product that would make a difference, helping them to come up with the idea for “Filled with Hope.”

“(We made) something that all students in college need: a water bottle,” Kilber said. “So we figured out a way to be able to donate some of our profit to the Water Project, who builds to make water sources for sub-saharan African countries.”

Although Kilber enjoyed this project, she said it also came with its challenges.

“It was a little chaotic here and there,” she said. “Getting the right product, a quality product, and figuring out how to target your audience was probably the hardest part of it, but overall it’s been a fun process.”

Sophomore Jake Smith teamed up with classmates to create “Loonessence.”

“Pretty much we sell steel cutouts of your state, and you can get them in a bottle cap collector or as a display of the state you can use in your own freedom,” Smith said. “With our nonbottle cap collectors, you can put a sticker on there, a photo of a friend or an array of pretty much anything that you want, and it also works as a magnet board.”

Smith said his team learned some valuable lessons while creating their product.

“One of the big things that we’ve learned as teammates and doing a business as a team is communication and being able to organize and communicate exactly our plans, our ideas, our hopes and our goals,” he said. “It’s been a great process through the entrepreneur program being guided by our professors, Dr. Johnson and Dr. Ebon, on how to do so.”

The students will display their products in ASC again during convo hour on Thursday, May 5.